How to Find Information on Someone: Your Guide
Evelyn Sanderson - January 30, 2025
When you meet someone online, how do you know they’re telling you the truth? Or, if you want to learn more about an employee working for a local business, how do you manage that? These are only a few examples of situations where you have to find information on someone, and there are many more.
Regardless of your motives, it’s a good idea to know how to find the information you’re after, and while it can be challenging, it doesn’t have to be.
Fortunately, we’re here to help. We cover how to find information on someone. Read on to learn more below.
What Information Can You Find on Someone?
When you’re looking for information on someone, you can find anything that’s on a public record. This means you can find criminal, court, and even marriage or divorce records. Additionally, public information you can find includes:
- Address
- Phone number
- Email addresses
- Social media accounts
- Websites
- Work history
- Education history
These are only a few examples of what you can find on someone, and depending on your search method, you can find a lot more.
Why You Need to Find Information on Someone
There are lots of reasons to find information on someone, but we bet there are a few that will surprise you. Learn about why you may need to find information on someone below.
Background Checks
Background checks are a great reason to learn more about someone if you have their consent and they’re not domestic help. Most employers run these checks to ensure that employees meet company standards based on their previous education, references, resume, and references.
Running background checks is an important part of the hiring process; especially if someone has a lot of red flags you wouldn’t know about if you didn’t run one. Plenty of online tools are available, but you can also run one with a background check company as well.
Verifying Someone’s Identity Online
Identity verification is another important method of finding information on someone. Even if you’re not running a professional background check, it’s a good idea to make sure the person you’re speaking with online is who they claim to be. For example, you can find information on someone to spot a catfish or to make sure a company is legitimate.
Verifying someone’s identity can be done using social media and people search tools. You can also verify the identity of someone who’s calling you if you know their phone number.
You Need to Contact Someone
Need to get in touch with someone? If so, you’ll first need to find this information. The good news is that most location and contact information are public records, so you shouldn’t have any issues finding it online. You can also visit state and local offices to find addresses and business information if you need to go that route.
How to Find Information on Someone
Several methods will help you find information on someone. That said, some are better than others. To prevent you from having to bounce around the entire internet, we’ve compiled a list of the best resources to help you find information on someone. Learn more below.
1. Information.com
The best way to find information on someone online is by using one of our people search tools. All you need is someone’s name, phone number, or address to start the process of finding information on someone.
Once you enter their information into one of our search tools, we’ll take it from there. We’ll comb through millions of public records to compile a full report about someone that includes all available online public records. In fact, we can even help you find some records that aren’t directly hosted online.
When you run a search with Information.com, we’ll help you find the following:
- Full name
- Date of birth
- Social media accounts
- Email addresses
- Criminal records
- Civil court records
- Marriage and divorce records
- Sex offender status
- Driving records
- Financial records
- Online dating profiles
- Phone numbers
- Addresses
Depending on the person, you may find some or all of this information when you run a search with Information.com. Even if you can’t find what you’re looking for in the full report, we can point you in the right direction.
2. Google
When you want to find information about someone online, there’s rarely a better place to be than Google. What makes Google a great resource is how well it functions as a search engine with only a few keywords. You can enter someone’s first and last name into the tool and see what comes up.
Don’t have someone’s name? Try an address, social media username, or phone number instead. Ultimately, Google offers several ways to search, so you don’t have to worry about coming up short if you don’t know a ton of information about someone.
The only drawback to Google is that it’s a mile wide and an inch deep when it comes to the specific information you can find about someone. For example, you may only find someone’s social media account or current website.
Google also has the flaw of showing you the most relevant results, which might not be what you’re looking for. If someone is named John Smith, for example, you’ll find the highest-ranking pages for John Smith, which might not be the person you’re looking for.
While you can mitigate these issues by using Google Advanced Search, it still might not be enough to find what you’re looking for. It’s for this reason that we recommend using Information.com instead.
3. Social Media
Finding information on someone has never been easier with social media being available. You can find the information on them by entering their name into the search bar and viewing their profile. If you’re friends with them, you can sync your contacts or go to your friends list to view this information – followers on some platforms.
Social Media platforms are great at helping you find bits of information about people. For example, you can find out when their birthday is, learn about a significant other, or even learn more about their occupation. Depending on the social media platform, you can find some or all of this information, but you may have to bounce around to different platforms to get the whole scoop.
That said, social media does have some drawbacks. The biggest issue is that you won’t always know what platforms someone belongs to. This means that you’ll have to find their accounts through trial and error first. Another problem is that if you don’t know who they are or you’re not friends, you might not be able to check their profile.
In these cases, we recommend starting with one of our people search tools instead.
4. Hire a Private Investigator (PI)
One of the most efficient ways to find information on someone is to hire a private investigator (PI). These are highly-trained and highly-skilled individuals or agencies that will help you find information on people. They can help you find anything that’s public record, and most PIs have access to resources that allow them to dig deeper than you might be able to.
While efficient, PIs aren’t cheap. Be ready to spend a few hundred dollars for them to find information for you, so we recommend only going this route if you’re on your last resort. Hiring PIs also works well for learning about secret information that’s otherwise hidden, so it might be worth the money if you need to do some deep digging for online dating platforms or affairs.
5. Run a Background Check
Working with a background check company or agency will help you learn more about someone. It’s one of the best ways to find information about someone, and you can use what you find to make hiring decisions or detect a possible catfish online.
The only drawback to working with background check companies is that they offer more competitive pricing for people who need bulk orders completed. Otherwise, it can be expensive. Fortunately, our online background check tool is affordable, easy to use, and just as comprehensive as any other background check, not taking into account drug screenings.
Still, we only recommend going this route if you need to hire employees, as it makes the most sense in these scenarios.
Find Information on Someone Today!
Finding information on someone has never been easier. With the right tools, you can find someone’s full name, where they live, and their contact information. Plus, you can run a full background check online when you use a reliable public records search tool like the options we offer at Information.com.
Regardless of why you need to find it, any of the tools we covered in this article will help you. That said, we always recommend starting with our people search tool unless you know where to go. It gives you the best possible starting point.
